Counting Lists

Michele needs a way to count the number of bulleted lists or the number of numbered lists in a document. She wonders how this could be accomplished in Word.

This is a bit harder than one might imagine, the bottom line being that we can find no way to generate a count reliably. The reason for this may take a bit of explaining.

There are multiple ways you can add styles to your document. For instance, you could click on either the Numbered List or Bulleted List tools on the Home tab of the ribbon to convert the current paragraph (or paragraphs) to a list. You could also start typing and allow Word to detect (via AutoFormat As You Type) whether you are creating a numbered list or a bulleted list. You could even define and apply styles that designate what you want used as a list.

Regardless of the way you create your lists, Word associates a style with the paragraphs in the list. If you create and apply your own style, then that particular style is (of course) used. If you use the toolbar buttons or rely on AutoFormat to create the lists, then Word automatically applies the List Paragraph style. (Yes, it uses the exact same style regardless of whether it is a numbered or bulleted list.)

Since styles are associated with the list, you can quickly determine how many instances of the style are in use. All you need to do is to display the Styles task pane (display the Home tab of the ribbon and click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group). Locate the style used for your lists, hover the mouse pointer over that style name, and then click the down-arrow that appears to the right of the name. You'll see something similar to one of the following appear:

• Select All: (No Data)
• Select All X Instance(s)

If what you see matches the first format, then select that option. When you hover over the style name and click the down-arrow again, what you see should match the second format.

You might think that this shows you the number of lists in your document. It doesn't; it only shows you the number of paragraphs formatted with this particular style. Thus, if you have a single list that is comprised of 6 items, then the style count returned will be 6. Thus, this approach—counting styles—doesn't provide a reliable way to determine a list count.

The other way you might consider is to use a macro to determine how many lists are in your document. Word maintains a Lists collection and makes it available to VBA. You can step through each list in the document and examine its ListType property. This property can actually be one of seven different values, as indicated by the following enumerations:

• wdListBullet
• wdListListNumOnly
• wdListMixedNumbering
• wdListNoNumbering
• wdListOutlineNumbering
• wdListPictureBullet
• wdListSimpleNumbering

You can probably figure out what each of these lists types entails, but how they play out in reality can be a bit perplexing. As an example, consider the following macro:

Sub CheckLists()
    Dim oL As List
    Dim sMsg As String
    Dim J As Integer
    Dim K As Integer

    J = ActiveDocument.Lists.Count
    For Each oL In ActiveDocument.Lists
        K = K + 1
        oL.Range.Select

        sMsg = "This is list " & K & " of " & J
        sMsg = sMsg & " lists in the document." & vbCrLf & vbCrLf
        sMsg = sMsg & "This list is this type: "
        Select Case oL.Range.ListFormat.ListType
            Case wdListBullet
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListBullet"
            Case wdListListNumOnly
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListListNumOnly"
            Case wdListMixedNumbering
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListMixedNumbering"
            Case wdListNoNumbering
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListNoNumbering"
            Case wdListOutlineNumbering
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListOutlineNumbering"
            Case wdListPictureBullet
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListPictureBullet"
            Case wdListSimpleNumbering
                sMsg = sMsg & "wdListSimpleNumbering"
        End Select
        MsgBox sMsg
    Next oL
End Sub

If you have a document that contains lists and run this, it will select each list, in turn, and display a message box that shows what type of list Word thinks the selection represents. The problem is, if your text contains two lists interspersed by a paragraph or two of text, Word considers it a single list of the wdListMixedNumbering type. In other words, it doesn't accurately figure out what is a list and what isn't a list. This makes this particular approach unreliable for counting how many lists are in your document, although it is more accurate than using the count-the-styles approach.

The bottom line, as mentioned at the beginning, is that there is no way that we can determine to accurately count the number of bulleted and numbered lists in a document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13528) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.